That evening, Pricie come out on the front porch, one baby holding to her hand and the other riding up on her hip. The younguns’ mouths was smeared blue with huckleberries.
“We’re goin to Gloria’s,” she said.
“Aint you better clean up them younguns before you take them out of here?”
“I run out of water. We’ll stop down at the pump.”
“Dont you stay gone all night.”
“I dont never, do I?”
They walked barefoot across the red dog, walked as straight and steady as if they’d had on shoes. Folks in the camps, their feet bottoms gets tough as hide.
I told Talcott about the club.
“Why’d I want to come to somethin like that?” he said. “I aint got no education.”
“You dont need no education. Sam Gore belongs and he aint got no education.”
“Yeah, but he’s a nigger.”
“Lookee here, we talk about what’s happenin in the world. Anybody can have an opinion.”
“Opinion? Sure, I got lots of opinions. So what?”
“You ought to be able to say what they are. You ought to hear what other fellers thinks.”
“Why? They aint got no more say-so than I do. Why do I want to waste a Sunday afternoon talking about some far off thing that dont have nothing to do with me?”
“Hit will expand your mind,” I said. “Hit’s like an education of itself, the way we talk. And Ermel supplies the beer and liquor free.”
“I dont need no free beer and liquor offn Ermel. I can buy my own.”
We ate another slice of pie and I helped fetch jugs of water from the pump. The water was thick and brown.
“I hope you boil this,” I said.
Talcott shrugged. “Sure. Skim that stuff offn the top. Looks like nigger piss, dont it? Hit’s either this or rainwater with wiggletails in it. Pricie likes the rainwater but I never could abide a damn bug.”
“Aint nothing wrong with rainwater,” I said. “We got a good well at Annadel, but we catch rainwater too.”
“You have it,” he said.
I couldn’t get nothing else out of him on any subject. Ever since Rondal left, it was like he’d closed himself off behind a wall of stubborn. His daddy had moved to Number Six Davidson so Kerwin could go to the high school. I couldn’t figure why Lytton Davidson would let them in up there, knowing that Rondal was theirn. But Doc said it would give them a way to keep up with Rondal. He couldn’t visit his family without Davidson knowing it.
When the Big War commenced, we couldn’t wait to sink our teeth into it at the club meeting. I took a hard time because I’d been predicting they’d be no war.
“They’s socialists in all them countries,” I’d said. “Hit’s international. A workin man in England aint goin to fight a workin man in Germany. Not for some capitalists, he aint.”
Even Doc disagreed with me on that.
“People is people,” he said. “We all got the devil in us.”
“Hit’s them Balkans got their dander up,” Isom declared. “They got tired of bein bossed around by them Austrians.”
“Naw,” said Doc Booker. “The real reason they fightin this war is over all them colonies in Africa. The German imperialists wants what the British imperialists has got.”
“Oh, hell,” said Isom. “What do them Croatians and Serbians know about Africa? They started it.”
“And we’ll finish it,” Ermel declared. “Wait and see. They’ll be American boys over there before this is all over.”
“Your man Woodrow says not,” I teased him.
“He aint my man just because he’s a Democrat. He’d need ten sets of balls before he could stand alongside William Jennings Bryan.”
Sam Gore went to the bar to fetch some liquor.
“What would ole Abe say to this?” Isom asked.
“He’d say, ‘America, the enemy is within.’” Sam raised a glass.
Behind him the door exploded and a score of men with drawn pistols poured into the room.
“Hands up! You’re under arrest!”
“What the hell?” Ermel stood up.
“Them’s Baldwins!” Isom cried. “I know that bastard there.”
“Shut up!” the leader said. He was a tall thin man with fleshy lips and a high, thin voice. “You’re under arrest for seditious activities.” He smashed a whiskey bottle with his rifle butt. “And for selling whiskey on Sunday.”
“I aint sellin it,” Ermel said. “I’m treatin my friends here. And you got no right—”
The man walked up to him and pointed the gun barrel at his temple.
“What you say?”
They tied our hands behind our backs and marched us to the train station. Annadel ran up just as we was boarding.
“Go git Roscoe,” Ermel called. She nodded mutely.
We was scared and quiet when they checked us into the county jail at Justice. All except Isom, that is.
“What is this?” he kept saying. “You cant do this.”
They hit him once and Ermel told him to pipe down. But he started up again when Doc, Sam and the other Negroes was set aside for separate cells in the back of the jail.
“That’s right!” Isom yelled. “Git them socialist niggers away from us good white men. Aint nothin worse than a red black man!”
Doc snickered and a guard pushed him.
“Son, you aint in Annadel,” Ermel said.
We was four to a cell, and only two cots. You couldn’t call them cots really because they was no mattresses, just the wire frames that grilled our hides if we stayed in the same position more than five minutes. And burlap sacks for cover. And the electric lights on all through the night. And hard-boiled eggs with cold fried baloney for every meal.
I slept until my neck ached and my head felt like the metal frame of the mattress had grown into my skull. Then I heard singing from the colored section. I sat up.
“What’s that?” Isom snickered. “‘Swing Low Sweet Chariot’?”
“No. Listen.”
It was the “Star Spangled Banner.” They sung it through and started it again. By the third time, a guard stalked past our cell, muttering to himself.
Isom laughed his high cackling laugh. “Jesus God! That’s the worst song in the world!” He kicked Everett Day, who slept on the floor. “Wake up, Everett. Let’s help em.”
We waited until they reached the beginning and started in. “Oh, say can you see, by the dawn’s early light!”
A guard ran up, banged on the door. “Shut that up!”
“O-oer the la-a-and of the freeee!”
We took shifts, sung it over and over again. Isom rocked back and forth on his heels, waved his arms in time to the music.
“Aint it fun bein seditious?” he said.
“—and the ho-ome of the bra-a-ave!”
After seven or eight hours, it weren’t so much fun. We tapered off a bit, but we managed to keep it going. Finally they let us out, cussing all the time. Annadel waited in the hallway along with Roscoe Titlow, one of Ermel’s Democrat cronies. Roscoe was a short man with close-cropped gray hair and a face that looked like it had been gnawed on.
“We been here since four o’clock,” Annadel said.
Isom hooted. “Hit was the singin done it! Where’s them red colored people? I want to shake somebody’s hand.”
The Negroes was brought up shortly. We hugged and jabbered, our voices cracking.
“All right, boys,” Ermel declared. “Hit was fun. But hit werent the singin done it. Hit were Roscoe here.”
Roscoe nodded his head. “Me and the sheriff had a little talk.”
“And the sheriff live beside the jail,” Doc Booker said. “Could he hear the singin?”
“He heard it,” Roscoe admitted. “Said it was drivin him crazy.”
We cheered, slapped backs, and headed for home.
We laughed about our jail stay, even long afterwards, but we cried when we got home. They had broke into our newspap
er office, smashed the press and scattered type out into the street.
“Never mind,” Ermel said. “I’ll help you start again.”
But it would be six months before we put out another edition of the Free Press. In the meantime, Isom come to me and Doc and said, “You’re right. We got to do something. And I got an idea.”
“What’s that?”
“Make me Chief of Police. Between us, we’ll make sure nobody can never come into Annadel and do this again. One thing I want to git straight, though. I aint no socialist, nor never will be. I dont care to see the government run these here mines.”
“Hell,” Doc said, “you think I want to see Woodrow Wilson in charge here? That man got his head so far up his ass he hear his heart beat.”
We already had a Chief of Police but he was tired of Annadel’s wild Saturday nights and agreed to go work for Ermel at a raise in salary. Isom took over. First thing we done was impose a one cent liquor tax. Then we joined the American Rifle Association and started to stockpile Krag-Jorgensen rifles.
Eleven
CARRIE BISHOP
I WENT BACK TO THE HOMEPLACE, AND BECAME PREOCCUPIED with the simple matters of living and dying. Aunt Jane passed away and her namesake was born to Ben and Flora.
Though my parents were both dead, I felt like an orphan for the first time. Aunt Jane was the last of the old people, born of the first settlers, wed and brought to the childbed during the War Between the States. For me she was a strong post to lean against. All my people knew about Rondal, but Aunt Jane alone took to her grave the knowledge of everything that had passed between us.
Flora and Ben grieved, but they had their first baby after two miscarriages, little Jane, and they could not feel totally bereft. They were continuing Aunt Jane’s line. I was happy for Flora, but at night I wept for myself. Only Aunt Becka was as shaken as me by Aunt Jane’s death. The women had a stormy kinship, but they had grown closer the last few years, Flora said.
“I think Aunt Becka was allays scairt of Aunt Jane. But Aunt Jane was feeble here of late. She lost some of her vinegar. They drawed close’t at the end.”
“They was two old women alone,” I said. “Like I’m going to be.”
“They’s worse things. You could be married to some rascal. Aunt Jane and Aunt Becka got on all right by theirselves.”
“Maybe. But I dont want Aunt Becka latching on to me now that Aunt Jane is gone.”
“Shame on you! Aunt Becka will be lonesome.”
“I know. And I dont want to see it. I’m too scairt of it for my own self to keep looking on it in her.”
“What about Aunt Jane? She lost her husband young, only had one youngun by him, and then lost the youngun too. She got on. She lived a full life. You cant say she werent happy.”
“Least she had a husband and a youngun for a time. Least she had them to remember on. That way she belonged here.”
“Carrie Lee, you stop that feeling sorry for yourself! Hit aint pretty to see. This here is your home and allays will be.”
It was a cold January day. We made biscuits in the kitchen beside a frosted windowpane. Flora flung her arms around me, careful not to touch me with her flour-dusted hands. I didn’t tell her that I feared we would lose the Homeplace some day. I tried not to think about it myself. It was bad enough to dread a long life without the love of Rondal and hope of children. But if there was no place of my own to be, no ground where my bones could be laid beside my kin’s, would I not be the most miserable creature in God’s world?
Flora still held me tight. “God has picked out a man for you somewhere,” she whispered.
“What if He aint? What if He dont mean for me to git married?”
“Then you got to accept God’s will.”
Her answer infuriated me. It was the answer she would give, the answer that all my people would give, all except Miles. But when I realized that, I was not so angry. It took a strength of will to give such an answer. If I could not say such words, if I could not overcome my selfishness, there was nothing left except to go off and turn my back on all I had come from.
I still prayed to God, as Aunt Jane and Aunt Becka had taught, even though I never really liked to go to church. The only church on Grapevine or Scary when I was a child had been the Holiness church at the mouth of Bearwallow. Daddy didn’t care for the Holy Rollers and all their noise. He wanted a church where he could sit quiet, but there had been no preachers raised up for that sort of thing in our vicinity. Aunt Jane wasn’t much of a churchgoer either, but she took me occasionally to Bearwallow. I was fascinated by the joyful whooping and the shimmying dances, but always left downhearted because we had not gotten the Holy Ghost the way the others had. When I mentioned this to Aunt Jane, she said, “Everbody gits the Holy Ghost in different ways. Me, I git it when I’m working the garden, when I see the food God gives us spring outen that rocky ground. I may not whoop and holler, but I swing my hoe in praise of the Almighty.”
“Maybe I git it down by the river,” I mused. “Sometimes they’s something special I feel when the sun lights the mountainsides and everthing looks so clear.” Then I remembered Old Christmas. “I got the Holy Ghost one time in the barn!” I exclaimed, and told her about the animals.
She nodded her head. “You see there,” she said, satisfied.
After she died, I took armloads of spar grass and cockscombs to scatter on her grave. Burying grounds, too, would be places to receive the Holy Ghost, places where God danced with the spirits of the departed while they awaited the great raising day. At the cemetery, my people whirled around me, all the Bishops and Mays and Thornsberrys, baby Honakers, and even Daddy, come from afar and dancing slow, reluctant.
I settled back into the rhythms of the Homeplace. Miles, uneasy and quiet, had come home for Aunt Jane’s funeral. We had little to say to each other. He returned the next year with a bride named Alice Collins, plump and curly-haired, the daughter of the bank president in Justice. She was not impressed with the Homeplace and I knew we wouldn’t see much of them. Then I was sorry for Miles, even though he was married. I thought he would lose his strength, like Samson shorn of his hair. But I would be as tough as Aunt Jane.
Ben subscribed to the Courier-Journal and it brought news of the rest of the world. I read of the strike violence in Colorado and fretted over Rondal, but an inner voice told me he was still alive. The war broke out overseas and we shook our heads and wondered at the reports of it. I nursed sick people all up Scary and Grapevine, and as far away as Henryclay, and delivered babies. At night we talked, told stories to the children, Jane and baby Luke, and turned the logs on the fireplace.
Then Albion Freeman returned.
He walked the eight miles from Kingdom Come, above Henryclay, where he lived. He had just moved up from Knott County to preach at a Hardshell Baptist church and to farm a piece of land near the head of the creek that didn’t seem to belong to anyone.
“What was you doing in Knott County?” Ben asked.
“I was preaching there, too. Only some of them didnt like the word I was bringing. I felt a call to come up this way anyhow. They aint no place I was ever happier than here in Paine County. I wanted to see yall again.”
They invited him to spend the night and we sat around the table after supper. I let the others ask the questions. I was a little frightened of him. He had been a slender, sharp-faced boy. He was still lanky but he had grown tall, over six feet, with a black stubble of beard, wiry hair that trailed over the collar of his shirt, and a long nose. His fingers were large and so gnarled they looked like he dug a corn patch with his bare hands. He kept looking at me, quickly, shyly. I studied my coffee cup.
“You’re awful quiet, Carrie,” Ben said once, and I wanted to smack him.
“I’m listening,” I said.
Albion went on with his story. His daddy had taken the consumption and a warm climate seemed to ease him, so they wandered out of the mountains into the foothills of Georgia. They share-cropped a farm near
Marietta. His daddy died in 1913 and Albion took off into the mountains again.
“The Lord has lead me hither and yon,” he said, “but seems like He has allays aimed to bring me back here.”
“How come you aint never married?” Flora asked.
“Aint settled in one spot long enough.” He looked at me again. “You aint never married neither.”
Rebellion made my voice sharp. “No, I aint. I dont never intend to git married.”
“Remember how we used to talk about marrying each other when we grew up?”
“We was just silly younguns,” I said. Aunt Becka kicked me beneath the table.
Flora put the children to bed and Ben took Albion to the parlor while Aunt Becka and I did the dishes.
“Why’d you kick me?” I asked.
“Cause you was being mean to that poor boy. Shame on you!”
“Well, he seemed to me like he was presuming some things. I dont like presuming.”
“He werent presuming nothing. He was trying to be nice. And ifn you would be sweet to him, he might take an interest. A preacher would make a good husband.”
I rattled the dishes in the washtub. “I dont think so. I think preachers is dull. Besides, why are you so anxious to find me a man all of a sudden? You done without by your own choice.”
“Because you aint happy, that’s why. Way things are, time you git my age, you’ll be bitter.”
When we went into the parlor, Flora and the men were discussing the crops we planted that spring.
“I put in a little patch of tobaccy, first time ever,” Ben said.
Albion shook his head. “It’s a heap of fuss.”
“But hit’s a little cash.”
“I got me a goat and a couple sheep. That there ewe is going to lamb real soon.”
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